Purpose The glass substrate transfer robot uses flexible arm and fork to transport the glass substrate which will generate vibration. To reduce the settling time and increase productivity, the authors proposed a vibration suppression method that integrated the continuous input shaping into the S-curve feedrate profiling. Design/methodology/approach The quasi-optimal S-curve feedrate profiling is achieved by the robot model. Then the outputs of the S-curve are shaped by the continuous input shaper, which can greatly lower the vibration and shorten the settling time. Findings The robot produces vibrations because of the flexibility of the belt system and the forks; the vibration of the robot is especially obvious in the acceleration and deceleration stage and the low-speed operation stage. Because the fork fingers are flexible, vibration at the end of the fork is enlarged. Originality/value The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the comparative experiments conducted on a glass substrate transfer robot.

In this paper, an efficient method based on a light section sensor is presented for measuring cylindrical objects’ radii and orientations in a robotic application. By this method, the cylindrical objects can be measured under some special conditions, such as when the cylindrical objects are welded with others, or in the presence of interferences. Firstly, the measurement data are roughly identified and accurately screened to effectively recognize ellipses. Secondly, the data are smoothed and homogenized to eliminate the effect of laser line loss or jump and reduce the influence of the inhomogeneity of measurement data on the ellipse fitting to a minimum. Finally, the ellipse fitting is carried out to obtain the radii and orientations of the cylindrical objects. Measuring experiments and results demonstrate the effective of the proposed radius and orientation measurement method for cylindrical object.